


Symphony No. 1 in the Key of Sam Winchester

by kisahawklin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 19:58:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10838346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kisahawklin/pseuds/kisahawklin
Summary: How music fits into Sam's life.





	Symphony No. 1 in the Key of Sam Winchester

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Симфония номер 1 в Ключе Сэма Винчестера](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11675187) by [Lost_In_The_Rye_Field](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lost_In_The_Rye_Field/pseuds/Lost_In_The_Rye_Field)



> I think there's a lot about Sam Winchester that we don't know. I think he has interests and skills and desires that simply get ignored because they don't fit into what the show needs Sam to be. But I want Sam to have those things, and I can't help writing them for him, finding ways to fill in some of the holes in his life, finding ways for him to have a full and satisfying inner life, if he can't have a full and satisfying outer one.

* * *

This is Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, mvt II. It's referenced in the work below, and generally works as a soundtrack. Feel free to play it as you read, or not.  


* * *

It starts out by accident. In one of the schools, in one of the towns, there's a "check out the band instruments day" and Sam has to go. It's fourth grade. Maybe fifth. 

They're all laid out on tables in the gym, and Sam dutifully tries each one of them, rolling his eyes when he gets in line for the flute the way all the boys do, because that's what _girls_ play. He hates all those boys, but he doesn't have the luxury of being an outsider when he's only going to be here for a few weeks or a month at most. It's too exhausting being an outsider, takes too much energy to watch your own back all the time.

When you have a pack – even if it's a pack of assholes, like these boys – you can just slip into the middle and let sheer numbers protect you. He's perfected the art of jokingly getting boys to stop talking about other people. It's never good when that happens. It always leads to bullying of some sort. But if you distract them with music or games or movies, they can be led off-topic. They're really incredibly stupid. 

But with the flute, they all look like morons because none of them can get a sound out of the thing. They're doing all this stupid shit, like trying to blow directly into the mouth hole. Sam takes one look at the instrument, and it's obvious that blowing directly into it won't produce any sound; it's a tube. You have to blow _across_ the mouth hole to get sound. It's like a coke bottle.

When it's his turn, he picks the thing up and holds it parallel to the floor, awkwardly, without any fingers on the keys because he has _no idea_ how that even works, and blows across the mouth hole. A low, breathy sound comes out – just like a coke bottle, but with less depth.

The whole room stops and stares at him. He can see the jeers in the boys' eyes, but the teacher nearly jumps on him in excitement, so they'll have to pick on him later for being a girl. 

"Sam!" the teacher exclaims. "Can you do that again?"

Sam shrugs and brings the thing to his mouth again and blows. Another low sound comes out, a little louder this time. 

"That's amazing! No one else has been able to get a sound out of it!" He's looking around the room for something and when he sees whatever it is, he takes Sam by the arm and drags him over. "Okay," he says, and sits Sam down. He comes around the back of Sam's chair and holds the flute in one hand and uses the other to bring Sam's left hand over the keys, and then Sam's right. It's still awkward as hell, and Sam isn't going to be in band, there's no way to learn an instrument with the way they travel, and even if he did, it would never be the flute.

Still, he humors the teacher. Mr. Wenger? Mr. Wagner, maybe. Whatever. He blows into the thing and presses a key or two, interested by how the tone changes when he does that.

* * *

Sam breaks into the band room that night only to find out that Mr. Wagner is still there at 8pm on a school night.

"Sam," he says, glancing at the door. Wondering if he locked it, probably. "What are you doing here?"

Sam can't answer that without admitting breaking in to steal something, so he goes on the offensive. "What are _you_ doing here?"

That makes Mr. Wagner laugh, and he says, "Jazz band rehearsal just finished, and I was doing a little practicing."

Sam glances at his desk and there's a score on it. He suddenly wishes desperately that he could read music. "Oh," he says.

Mr. Wagner follows the line of his gaze and smiles softly at him. "Why don't you come on in," he says, and leads the way to his office. 

It's huge, for an office, and there are a bunch of file cabinets at one end and a piano at the other, with three chairs and two music stands off to the side. The desk is in the middle of the room, a little awkwardly, but the only real place for it. As they scoot by it, Sam sees six or seven instruments on stands.

"Do you play all those?" Sam asks. There are three different saxophones, a couple of different clarinets, a flute, and some weird thing they definitely didn't bring to band day.

"I do," Mr. Wagner says. There's a piece of music on one of the stands, with oddly hand-written looking notes on it. "I'm playing in the pit for The Music Man this weekend. It's a hard book."

He flips through the book and opens it to a page, picking up the flute and playing something fast and jazzy. 

"Five instruments. Usually it's not that many."

Sam nods. That sounds impossible. There's a feeling stirring in him, a not-unfamiliar one, but one that always hurts and gets worse with every new interest in every new school. He turns and looks at the door. 

"Why are you here, Sam?" Mr. Wagner asks gently. 

Sam turns to him, because he _can't_ , it's ridiculous to even think he might have this –

"Do you want to learn?" Mr. Wagner asks, only waiting a beat while Sam stutters out a not-syllable before continuing with, "Because I'm happy to teach you. At night, if that's what you need."

Sam's heart is jackrabbiting and he knows he should politely refuse and avoid Mr. Wagner until they get out of this podunk town, but he can't help it. He knows reaching for things he shouldn't have is just going to hurt in the end, but he doesn't know how not to want things. Dean can do that, has somehow made himself only want the things that Dad wants for them, but Sam doesn't want those things, never has, and only ever did them because he wanted Dean to like him.

"I'd _like_ to teach you, if you have the interest," Mr. Wagner says, and Sam swallows, and nods, mute.

"All right," he says, pushing the stand out of the way and leading Sam over to the piano. "Let's start here."

* * *

Music is a language. 

Sam hadn't realized that at first. He didn't really have any strong thoughts about the piano before Mr. Wagner started teaching him, but after, he loved it. His hands aren't dexterous enough to be really good at it, but it's the rosetta stone for the language of music, and his mind could see exactly how everything worked, how notes tied together, how they made chords and harmonies and eventually songs and movements and symphonies.

He's good with languages. He never thought he was good at music, but once he gets the underlying structure, he can understand the language fluently. He can't speak it too well yet, but that's often the way he learns languages. It takes a while for his body to use what his brain knows.

He learns other instruments, the clarinet being the one that sticks. He carries reeds around with him from town to town, but always ends up "borrowing" one from a local music shop that he returns before they leave town. There's no way to sneak a clarinet into the Impala, no matter how crafty he is. 

Eventually he grows out of it. Like any language, he has to keep up with it or lose it. It becomes too difficult to stay in band in high school and eventually he even stops glancing longingly at pianos when they come across them.

* * *

He's sixteen the first time he hears a professional symphony. They're being chased by a shifter – a really fast one – and Dean ducks into the back door of a symphony hall. 

It's just a rehearsal, but the music speaks to him like nothing ever has. It's sweeping, huge in scale, and it _moves_ and Sam can feel something almost-forgotten stir in him at the sound. The conductor raps his baton on the stand and says it's a good thing Beethoven's deaf so he can't hear this disaster in heaven.

It takes him two weeks in the library, but he finally finds the right recording. It's the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony, and he closes his eyes to let it sweep over him. It is exactly as he remembers it, a strange, shifting landscape that changes from smiling to stormy in the blink of an eye, a change in the melody rippling over major and minor intervals like the river over rocks and pebbles and it so reminds him of his life that he can't do anything but be still and let the music wash over him.

When the tape runs out, Sam sits in the library corral, feeling hollow. He'd forgotten this language, but not completely – the Beethoven speaks directly to his soul, echoes how he feels and also leads him to feel something new. He likes communicating, thrives on it, even, but he is pretty sure this is one language he will only ever be able to hear, and not speak. He steals the tape out of the case, mumbling an apology as he leaves the library.

* * *

Sam builds up a collection of symphonies. By the time he's living with Jess, it's a whole cabinet in the living room, several collections of Brahms and Beethoven because his mood dictates which conductor he wants to listen to. Maudlin? von Karajan. Chipper? Barenboim. Stoic? Solti. 

Jess isn't a big classical music fan, but in a twist that shows him just how fucked up his life has been to this point, she supports and encourages his hobby, buying him top-of-the-line headphones to listen to his favorite music. Sometimes she even lets him play the music on the speakers, especially if she's painting. 

When she dies, everything about Sam's life at Stanford breaks down like a collapsing soufflé. The music is gone in an instant, burned in the same fire that took Jess's life, and it doesn't take long for all of his habits and routines and relationships to follow suit. 

That guy is one Dean will never know, not that he cares. Dean has never cared about what Sam likes or wants outside of hunting, outside of what they like together. He remembers lost fluencies, sports and classic rock and sci fi, and discards the pieces of his Stanford life like clothes he's outgrown.

The languages stick, though, and are useful in the job. So Latin and French and Spanish and even sign language, when he meets Eileen, come in handy. They haven't come across a case that requires the musical language, but Sam privately thinks its because they don't know what to look for. It doesn't matter. 

He stumbles across a classical music collection several months into their time at the bunker. The recordings are old, and he finds a new appreciation for conductors he'd only been passingly familiar with before. Reiner and Maazel, Toscanini and Klemperer and Stokowski, they all have particular styles and from bombastic to reserved, and he relearns his favorite music under the hands of new teachers.

* * *

Sam had tried to learn guitar when he was at Stanford. Someone had told him that it was the easiest instrument to learn, but once he'd tried it, he vehemently disagreed. Its system was the opposite of the piano – obscuring the language so translating it was twice as difficult, like trying to read Portuguese with only a decent working knowledge of Spanish to go off of. Some things were in the same place, but so many of the details were not.

He'd never really taken the guitar back up, but he's often wondered if maybe he could get Dean to try it. As a language, Dean speaks music the way he speaks most languages, in big picture thoughts, the key words or phrases sticking, but not a lot of the nuance. Enough to get the job done.

Sam thinks maybe the guitar could be perfect for Dean. An introduction to subtlety, not to mention a hobby that doesn't involve getting dirty in some way or another. He's fairly certain Dean will learn the language sounds-first, not words-first, the way Sam did. That's just the way Dean is. He has to feel something to believe it's worth knowing. 

Sam does it without fanfare, just buying a guitar one day and leaving it on Dean's bed. He knows either Dean will come storming out of his room demanding an explanation, or ostentatiously ignore the gift, not even mentioning it. He's curious to know which one it will be.

Dean comes in from Baby's oil change, his footsteps leading to his room, and the first reaction is stunned silence. Sam can hear the lack of sound down the hall in his room; he holds his breath. He's expecting a _Sam!?!!_ but he doesn't get it. He waits a moment longer before getting up and sticking his head out into the hallway to hear better. 

There's a quiet strum of open strings, and then Dean clomping down the hallway to the shower room. Sam peeks around the corner of the hallway, watching Dean's back with his towel slung over one shoulder and trying not to feel disappointed.

He sneaks into Dean's room and sees that the guitar is still where he left it, not even shifted so Dean could strum it. He sighs and leaves it where it is. Maybe Dean just needs some time.

Later that night, he hears some tentative plucking coming from the direction of Dean's room, and he smiles to himself. Dean is like a skittish animal. If you know just how to approach it, you can get it to take your offerings, but it takes years of trust-building and a sixth sense for just the right timing. 

He doesn't bring it up and neither does Dean, but after a few weeks, he makes tea for them one night, putting a ton of honey in Dean's, and walks it down to Dean's room. He can hear the notes as he goes and he was right, Dean's picking out melodies of his favorite songs, the sounds coming easily to him, their structures speaking to Sam in a new way, hearing them in this context.

He stands in the doorway for a while, watching Dean with his head down over the guitar, looking down at his fingers while he noodles his way around some Zeppelin. Sam grins, leaning against the doorframe and just listening. 

After a minute, he clears his throat and Dean looks up, unguardedly surprised for a minute before his usual mask of casual indifference descends. 

"Sounds good," Sam says, trying to bring back the openness he'd seen before it gets completely boxed up. Dean wouldn't have been playing with his door open if he hadn't wanted Sam to know.

Dean looks down at the guitar and back at Sam, like he doesn't know what to make of that. Sam walks into the room and hands off Dean's tea. He takes it and wraps his hands around the mug. "My fingers get so cold when I play," he says, like this is something they discuss all the time. 

Sam plays along, fondness for Dean and hope for the both of them expanding in his chest as he does so. "It'll happen less as you get better," Sam says, letting the information sit between them to see what Dean makes of it. He grunts and nods, taking a sip of his tea.

Sam holds back a sigh. They've gotten so bad at this. When did they lose the ability to really talk to each other? They might not have always had the right words to do it, but they had the right intentions. The important things got said, if only in insinuation and offhanded remarks. He tries again.

"I want to get a piano." 

Dean's face opens up again, surprise to start but then something almost sad. Loss or sorrow, maybe. "You play?" he asks. A little straightforward, for them, though there's a lot of history cunningly buried in the depths of the question.

"Some," Sam admits. He'll never be good at speaking the language of music, but it's not always about the skill. Sometimes it's just about surrounding yourself with the things you love.

Dean gives him a grudging nod, like he appreciates there are things about Sam he has yet to learn. "Yeah, okay," he says, taking another sip of his tea.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Music seems to always make its way into my fandoms, because I am a musician. I was a professional musician, though I don't do that anymore. But I miss it like an ache, and I have lots of opinions about music, and what it is and isn't and what fluency means, and what talent means and how those things intertwine (and don't). I have similar opinions about Sam having things that are typically considered Dean's but in a different way, which has bitten me in the ass at least once, but I don't care, because I want Sam to be happy and have nice things.
> 
> But anyway – what I meant to say is that there is a LOT of me in this story – which isn't unusual because I relate to Sam a lot – but this one is perhaps more of a blend of me and Sam than usual.


End file.
